Michael Le Page

speaker

580 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3d ago

Michael Le Page’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The World, the Universe and Us · Breakthrough Synthetic Cell Has Just Reproduced - But Is It Alive? · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

So these cells, they can't make any of the chemicals they need and they can't make the building blocks of DNA.

They can't make the building blocks of protein.

and they also one key thing is they can't make the protein making factories ribosome the ribosome so those had to be supplied to them from the beginning yeah and so the team was constantly sort of feeding them these nutrients now a couple of the genes code for proteins that form pores on the outside of these spud cells so they can get some small molecules into them through those pores but a lot of the feeding had to be done by making little bubbles full of food that would fuse with the spud cells so it's quite

an involved process i mean i sort of thinking of it as like spoon feeding a child this is yeah you know this is uh they need a lot of care and attention but they can divide a bit can't they is it up to five rounds of division which is impressive yes does does this mean that they're alive

Well, the first thing to say is for them to divide, what the team do is they add these large proteins to the solution.

And when those proteins bind to the spud cells, they start jostling for space is how Kate described to me.

And then that makes the membrane bend.

And sometimes you get bits of the spud cell budding off.

But it's not an equal division.

It's not sort of, you know, the spud cell isn't dividing neatly in two.

And also the sort of bits of DNA inside it, they're not being equally shared.

So it's quite random.

So some of the cells that bud off, some of the daughter cells have not got all the genes they need and they dead end.

But some of them just by chance, they do have all the genes they need and then they can go on and repeat the cycle.

So, yeah, it's cell division, which is incredibly impressive, but it's a very sort of primitive, rough and ready.

You've got to start somewhere, right?

Yeah, so I asked Kate about that, and she said that the problem is that it's very hard to make a big piece of DNA with all the genes on it.

That would be the ideal.

So that's still a sort of technical capability that we don't have.

There's only 36 genes, though.

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